However, I think rb is as fast as it needs to be. The same for python. It's rarely computation speed that is the bottleneck and when it does become a bottleneck you take out psyco or gcc.
He comes up with a rather odd conclusion -- that the algorithm matters most -- when it seems that the fastest Ruby algorithm is about twice as slow as the slowest Python algorithm.
It is true that Ruby will probably have a VM in 2.0 -- and probably a faster VM than CPython's unadorned VM -- but Python already has an optimizer that could probably do great on this algorith (psyco), and a working (but still young) system that could probably compile these fairly straight-forward algorithms into fast C (PyPy).
Comment
in other words... python rocks?
However, I think rb is as fast as it needs to be. The same for python. It's rarely computation speed that is the bottleneck and when it does become a bottleneck you take out psyco or gcc.
Parent comment
He comes up with a rather odd conclusion -- that the algorithm matters most -- when it seems that the fastest Ruby algorithm is about twice as slow as the slowest Python algorithm. It is true that Ruby will probably have a VM in 2.0 -- and probably a faster VM than CPython's unadorned VM -- but Python already has an optimizer that could probably do great on this algorith (psyco), and a working (but still young) system that could probably compile these fairly straight-forward algorithms into fast C (PyPy).